Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(2)

RICHIE MCGILL


The whole thing with Johnny’s leg was fucked up. I was the only one in the band to visit him, and let me tell you, the dude was in bad shape. I mean, like, his hair was greasy and his clothes smelled and his room was a total mess.

He asked me why Harry didn’t come, too, and I didn’t know what to say. Harry had shut himself off from the rest of the world and was kind of being a whiny bitch. Johnny didn’t need to hear about Harry’s crap while he was sitting there with one of his legs gone.

I called Harry and tried to convince him to go see Johnny, but when that dude gets caught up in his own shit, there’s no getting through.

I give him a pass, though, you know, because of his face and stuff.





HARBINGER JONES


Both Richie and my shrink got on my case about being a recluse after the tour imploded, but it wasn’t until serendipity put Cheyenne and me in the same place at the same time that things changed.

I was on one of my favorite walking paths, feeling sorry for myself, blaming myself for what had happened to Johnny, when I stumbled across Chey standing on a footbridge. She looked so incredibly beautiful standing there that any thought of Johnny went right out of my head. I ignored every good instinct I had and decided to go for broke.

“Chey, I love you,” I told her.

She threw up on my shoes.

For real.

It turned out that Johnny had been keeping Chey away, and the girl was so tortured over it that she got literally lovesick all over my sneakers. I felt bad enough for her that I stupidly offered to help her and Johnny reconcile. (If I’m being honest, I would’ve done anything to make Cheyenne Belle happy, to make her like me back, even if it made no sense.) Of course, that meant I would have to visit Johnny first.

Johnny and I had a lot of stuff to work through, but we managed it. We took what was left of our tattered friendship to the only place where it would have a chance to heal: music. We found peace and we found our friendship buried in the music. It always comes back to the music.

And I was true to my word. My visit opened the door for Johnny and Chey to get back together.





CHEYENNE BELLE


Johnny lived in a much nicer part of town than me. His neighborhood was called Colonial Heights; mine was called McLean Avenue. That’s the name of the street I grew up on. My neighborhood wasn’t cutesy enough to have a name like Colonial Heights. His street was lined with oak trees, and the houses had shrubs and fences protecting mowed lawns with dogs barking hello in the front yard. Mine was a scraggly street with low-rent retail, auto shops, and apartment buildings. We had dogs, too, but they were mostly pit bulls and Doberman Pinschers. So Colonial Heights was a different world than mine, still Yonkers, but a different world.

Johnny’s house was three stories tall, with dark wood trim and all kinds of funky angles. It sat on a bend in the road on a supersteep hill; and he told me that at least once a year someone would crash a car through the bushes that lined the curb and wind up on his front lawn. That’s crazy, because the spot where Johnny was hit by the car, about a mile away, was almost exactly like that.

Inside, the house was massive, too big for Johnny and his parents. His older brother, Russell, moved to New York City after graduating college, like five or six years earlier, but even if Russell had been living there, the house still would’ve been too big.

The coolest thing about the place was the sunken living room. Maybe that’s not the right thing to call it, because it was too tall to be sunken. Maybe I should just call it the cathedral, like Harry does. Floor to ceiling it was eighteen feet. I know that because Johnny liked to tell people that his was the only house that could hold a seventeen-foot Christmas tree and still have room for the star.

Anyway, Harry had been to see Johnny the day before and told me what to expect.

“He’s a mess, Chey.” Harry had come straight to my house after seeing him. “He hasn’t showered; he’s not even getting out of bed.”

“What did he say about me?” I know how lame that sounds. I should’ve been asking about Johnny, but I was too far gone. My heart hurt so bad I thought it would burst.

“He’s been pushing you away”—Harry paused for a second and then made air quotes—“for your own good.”

“My own good?”

“He thinks you deserve to be with someone who isn’t . . . who isn’t . . .”

“Isn’t what?”

Harry looked at the ground and said in a very soft voice, “deformed.” Like I told you, Harry sees his scars as way worse than other people do. He kind of thinks he’s the Elephant Man. I didn’t know what to say.

Harry told me not to expect miracles. “I’ve been where Johnny is,” he said. “He has a long, slow road to recovery, and there are going to be lots of ups and downs.”

That phrase lots of ups and downs was echoing in my head when I rang Johnny’s doorbell the next day. It was a Saturday, so I braced myself for his mother to answer. She hated me, thought I was a bad influence on her little angel. She loved to make little comments about how wrong I was for her son. “We’re so proud Johnny got into Syracuse, aren’t you? It will give him a chance to carve out a whole new life for himself, don’t you think?” Only the last laugh was on her. Johnny’s accident stopped him from ever going to Syracuse. I was ringing his doorbell in early August, and there he was—no way he would be leaving Yonkers.